Valerie Werder

Valerie Werder is a writer and scholar of film and photography currently completing her Ph.D. in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Body Camera,”  theorizes police bodycam footage as a highly mediated audiovisual form that asks viewers to inhabit the perceptual space of a state violence worker. “Body Camera” formulates an abolitionist viewing mode (departing from progressive juridical modes that treat such images as unviewable anathema, juridical witnesses, or forensic evidence), asking what images imbricated in systems of harm need in order to function and be received differently.

Werder’s debut novel, Thieves (2023), was winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Her writing has appeared in Public Culture, Film Quarterly, BOMB, and Flash Art, and she has exhibited work at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn; Participant Inc, New York; and Artspace, New Haven. Werder was a 2021 fellow in the Art & Law Program and a 2023 fellow at the New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She is currently a mentor in the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program and a researcher with The Black Response Cambridge.